


Historia

by adreadfulidea



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Backstory, Domestic Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 03:32:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4044259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreadfulidea/pseuds/adreadfulidea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miss Giddy was the first wife, though there are not many who remember that now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Historia

**Author's Note:**

> There's a brief scene of domestic violence in this as well as a reference to suicide, and it covers the same themes regarding sexual assault as the movie but isn't graphic.

 

 

Miss Giddy was the first wife, though there are not many who remember that now.

That was in the Before; and most days it seemed like she was the only survivor of that time. The only one who could remember the cities before they became hollowed out husks, the planes that used to streak across the sky, the powerlines that hummed above her head as she drove down the highway. Who remembered the green.

Her memory was getting fuzzy, but she had the names on her skin to refer to. Places, concepts, lines of poetry. Names of the ones she had lost.

She told the girls about it. All of them, all down the years. Drew them pictures when they couldn’t understand. They were so young. Everyone was in the wasteland. People didn’t live as long as they used to.

Even old Joe was dying. He just wouldn’t admit it.

 

 

She met Joe when he was nineteen. Rangy and kinetic, fresh out of a year in the military. They had thrown him out and she was fool enough to think that was funny. Barely more than a boy, but Giddy had still been a girl herself and wild as a brush fire. Nothing could contain her back then. The world was going to end and everyone knew it. So why make plans.

She’d dropped off the balcony - one floor up, no sweat - with a bag over her shoulder and her whole life ahead of her. Right into his arms. Her roommate had leaned over the railing and yelled, “This is a _horrible_ fucking idea, Giddy! I ought to call your mother, I really ought to.” Giddy had laughed and laughed from the back of Joe’s bike, waving goodbye. They tore up the lawn when they left. They tore up the street.

(The world _had_ ended, not long after. She had been right about that. What she didn’t expect was that Joe would take to it like a duck to water.)

 

 

It was Joe and Giddy who found the spring underground in what would become the Citadel. Joe and _Giddy_ , both of them, no matter what he would claim later. There weren’t many in their group in those days; a few wells dug by their own hands served them all just fine. People built houses and settled down again. It was an oasis in the desert.

Later Giddy would think of that first day, watching water bubble up through the parched earth; would recall the way she and Joe had screamed and clutched at each other. And she would not be able to trace a path from then to where they ended up.

 

 

The men started talking about repopulation a few years in. People drifted in from the outside steadily but slowly. Someone was constructing a town on the horizon. A few rickety buildings could be seen with a telescope but there was no way to communicate with them without risk. Greater numbers would mean greater strength, the men said.

Giddy couldn’t have children. It had never mattered before.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said to Joe that night, when they were alone. That was the only time he listened to her anymore. “What the hell would having kids do? They’re babies, they can’t help us defend ourselves.”

“We have to think in the long term,” Joe said. “Not for now, Giddy, but for the future. I’m building something here.”

We, thought Giddy. _We’re_ building something.

 

 

So Joe took a second wife. He took a second wife because Giddy was tired and sick of him and if someone else wanted in she didn’t care enough to fight about it.

She didn’t expect to love Hannah the way she did. Hannah had a soft face and hard hands. She could strip down a carburetor quicker than any of the men. Giddy taught her to shoot, aiming at old car parts from the top of a sand dune. When Hannah became pregnant they bounced names back and forth between themselves; _Jane_ was too plain, _Anastasia_ was too fancy.

Joe insisted the baby was going to be a boy, but Giddy knew in her bones a little girl was coming their way.

They had been collecting books as they found them. Out of wrecks in the desert or burned out houses. Some brought them in with them, cherished childhood stories given by a Dad or a Mum, family photographs between the pages. Giddy raided the library for anything she could find on childbirth or midwifery.

And when it all went wrong and Hannah bled out no matter what they did - it was Giddy, not Joe, who wept.

 

 

She tattooed Hannah’s name on her forearm and spent the better part of the next couple of months shitfaced on homemade rotgut. The War Boys - god, that name was a fucking joke - made it out of fermented root mash. It smelled like antifreeze and burned the inside of her mouth, but she didn’t care.

When she emerged from her stupor there was a girl in her bedroom. A girl who couldn’t be more than seventeen years old, who was crying and terrified.

Giddy launched herself screaming at Joe when he came in. It made no difference. He was so much _bigger_ than her. He slapped her across the face hard enough to leave blood on her teeth. Joe always had a mean streak in him but that was the first time he hit her.

She slept outside that night, on the top of the Citadel where the garden was. Alone, wrapped in a blanket to try and keep out the night chill, with the taste of tin in her mouth. There was nowhere else to go.

 

 

The girl’s name was Damaris and her belly swelled quickly. There was no dreaming of a baby’s future this time, no debating names with a friend. Damaris had no friends. Neither did Giddy, crazy Miss Giddy gotten old before her time. She stayed down with the War Boys and avoided even seeing Joe. He looked less and less like a man to her when their paths did cross. Hulking, strange, symbolic.

She and Damaris spoke only the one time, when the girl was heavy with her second child.

She asked for help, got Giddy alone and said they should run off together. They could make it, she said. Damaris used to run with the scavenger clans, she knew how to survive.

Giddy said no. A week later Damaris jumped from her window.

 

 

Giddy inked the name into her skin. All the names, all the girls through the years. The girls got younger. The girls disappeared. She had to remember them. Someone had to. She cleaned up after them and taught them about the way the world used to be. She did what she could.

When the Splendid Angharad came to her the way Damaris had and asked for help Giddy did not turn her away. She said yes. Yes, _yes_.

When Joe came towards her in a towering rage, the Immortan, nothing of the boy she had known left in him, she picked up the gun. It felt familiar in her hands - it felt good.

She had failed once. She would not let herself fail again.

 


End file.
